[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SAX, OASIS, &c.
At 09:14 AM 2/22/00 -0800, Jon Bosak wrote: >I see from xmlhack that I've become embroiled in a debate taking >place in a list that I don't s*bscribe to. Oops. > >I hope that everyone will simply allow me to start over here. Many thanks, Jon, for taking the time to write at length. XML-DEV is at a very exciting and critical phase and your views are respected by many, including myself. They will help us to define what we can and what we cannot do. > >Some questions have arisen over my comments about democracy. My >definition of democracy is taken from the Oxford English >Dictionary: > > 1. Government by the people; that form of government in which > the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is > exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics > of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. > >"Exercised directly" means today exactly what it meant "in the >small republics of antiquity": it means voting. "Elected" means >voting, too. But some people define democracy as in the next >sentence from the same dictionary: > > In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in > which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary > differences of rank or privilege. > >I mean democracy in the technical sense of the first part of the >definition, not in the loose sense of the second. Properly >speaking, the process by which SAX is being designed is not >democratic, because its only way to resolve differences of opinion >is through the personal decision of an unelected individual. The >fact that the individual in question happens to be doing a >near-perfect job seems to make people oblivious to the problem of >how this is all supposed to work over the long run. This is very useful. I think that XML-DEV is - rightly - working out what democracy can mean. In terms of XML-DEV I use the word meritocratic. In terms of real-life I suspect that Jon's first definition is more likely to be effective. >I can testify that you do not want to be using an unstructured >process like the one that's been working so far in this list when >it reaches the point where big chunks of people's code get written >in slightly different ways according to slightly different models >of the next release or variant interpretations of the current one, >and you have to use the list to decide whose early implementation >decisions will end up instantiated in the spec and whose ten >thousand person-hours of effort will end up in the trash can. >Without a democratic process for the orderly resolution of >competing interests, this becomes (to use a phrase Len Bullard >taught me) nothing but a knife fight. And pretty soon it attracts >the participation of well-funded people who *like* knife fights. >This is what happens when large sums of money are involved. I'm >sorry, but that's how it is. I agree with this. There are people whose sole motivation is to destroy consensus. I fear this for CML - company X could *deliberately* put out a non-compliant CML implementation. As a part-time temporary academic I cannot personally afford to buy and support a worldwide trademark for CML, so I need real-life organisations. [It is perfectly possible for an organisation to trademark SAX and prevent this community using it - or at least fighting them.] > >I believe that David is far too sane to stay in his current role >with SAX for the rest of his life. At some point he's going to >put the responsibility for sorting out future knife fights >somewhere else. Whether that responsibility ends up with us, or >with a vendor-run consortium, or with the leading implementor >appears to be up to us to decide. If we want it to end up with >us, then we have to put in place genuine, heavy-duty, >industrial-strength decision processes that can resolve real >differences between real competitors and are guaranteed to stay >open to the participation of all interested parties even when >working under full load. It doesn't have to be done right this >minute, but it has to be done at some point if we want to remain >relevant to the direction of this technology over the long run >rather than turning over responsibility to the vendors. > I agree with this analysis. I have seen a widely used open-source program seriously compromised by commercial interests - it got into the editorial in Nature Biotechnology. The result is messy and the individual concerned came out very badly. *** Please don't take any of this as changing my views on what XML-DEV is and should evolve into. *** It just seems to me inevitable that at some stage our fruits are deliberately or by default handed on elsewhere. I don't think there is a point in setting up "xml-dev.org" - any case that has apparently been taken [who knows why and what for - did anyone ask any of us?] >The world won't end if we don't accomplish this and if future >versions of SAX and other XML standards come to be defined by >vendor consortia or in proprietary back rooms. But we certainly >won't be left with any warrant to complain about this outcome if >we fail to provide a legal, democratic alternative. Agreed. P. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/threads.html ***************************************************************************
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